David Jaffe has shared some more specific details as to why his upcoming title Twisted Metal has been delayed until early 2012.

Jaffe explained on Twitter that the team needed more than the time they had available before the intended launch date to fine tune the game, and that by missing this launch date they’ve missed the prime launch window before Christmas.

He also provided a list of more specific issues that will be addressed with the extra development time his team now has, including boss attacks, balancing issues and item placement.

You can take a look at his full statement below.

“No real way to ship Twisted Metal sooner than the date we
are currently shooting for (early 2012)…Sorry for the delay. But the
extra months are really needed for polish and we feel we need more than
4-6 weeks (which would see us hitting shelves in your suggested November
time frame) of polish/tuning. Also hitting smack dab in mid Nov/Mid Dec
is a bad time to release this game (although that was not the reason we
delayed AT ALL…we WANTED to be out in Oct)…but the extra time gives
us more time to balance weapons, tune vehicle handling, tune the EXP
progression for levelling up, etc…I assure you, better to be a LITTLE
ANNOYED in the short term versus hate us forever for shipping a game
that’s not up to your understandably high expectations. ANY money is a
lot to ask from someone for entertainment. 60 bucks is a S**TE TON to
ask for so if we are going to charge that, you deserve our best…even
if it takes a little longer than we anticipated.”

“Some examples of stuff we’re not happy with yet- which should allow
you and others to really peek behind the scenes at the kind of stuff
this kind of extra time will allow:”

- Iron Maiden has a few boss attacks that don’t have strong enough
telegraphs (aka- the player isn’t able to clearly, consistently tell
when she is going to launch the attack)

- Iron Maiden has an attack that- even if you can see it coming- the
player is not really sure how to avoid it besides using a shield (and we
want the player to always have another defensive ability beyond a
shield)

- We are not 100% happy with the XP rank up tuning.we don’t want you
to be able to hit the level cap too soon but we also don’t want the
level cap to be so hard to reach that only super amazing hard core can
reach it

- There are 1-2 online trophies that will motivate players to take
actions that go against the more team oriented aspects of some of the
modes and thus will piss off other players so we need to rethink and
replace those

- Pick up placements for split screen local gaming needs more attention

- Pick up regen timing needs some tuning

“So imagine about 250 of those sorts of things. Could we ship
without change a single one? Totally and it would still be a really fun
game. But it would not be good enough for us. And certainly not for you.”